On the dark side,<\/p>\n
- \n
- The dangerous idea that the United States was chosen by God;<\/li>\n
- Trump treats half the American population as enemies, now calling them “communists”;<\/li>\n
- Why church and state should be kept separate, as the founders wanted;<\/li>\n
- Thought: didn’t the earliest settles to North America flee the same kind of religious persecution that MAGA is eager to impose on others?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n– – –<\/div>\n
Today is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, by the US, to separate itself from English rule.<\/p>\n
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*<\/p>\n
Some overviews then.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Once again, there are always problems, but people typically don’t give credit where credit is due; they don’t appreciate what we have and what we’ve accomplished.<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nWashington Post, Editorial Board, today<\/strong>: 25 reasons to be optimistic about America’s future<\/a><\/p>\n
The graphic is animated; it’s worth clicking through to watch it.<\/p>\n
The United States has had a tumultuous history, and there have always been reasons to worry about the country\u2019s future. The frosted glass of memory produces nostalgia for bygone eras.<\/p>\n
Freedom and prosperity are never guaranteed, but it\u2019s a mistake to bet against America. That\u2019s as true now as when the country was founded 250 years ago.<\/p>\n
Here are 25 reasons to believe the best days are still ahead for the United States.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’ll summarize and paraphrase, then comment. By ‘we’ I mean the U.S.<\/p>\n
- \n
- We’re a powerhouse in science<\/li>\n
- We have the top universities in the world<\/li>\n
- Life expectancy has reached a new high<\/li>\n
- Cancer is becoming less deadly<\/li>\n
- We’re reaping extraordinary medical breakthroughs<\/li>\n
- mRNA technology<\/li>\n
- The US dollar is the world’s undisputed currency<\/li>\n
- More than half the world’s top 100 publicly traded corporations are American<\/li>\n
- And 62% of Americans have a direct stake: they own stocks<\/li>\n
- We lead the world in venture capital<\/li>\n
- We’re getting wealthier<\/li>\n
- The US median household has a higher income that 96% of the world’s population<\/li>\n
- The US is a magnet for talent<\/li>\n
- We’re the largest oil exporter<\/li>\n
- We’re experiencing a boom in solar and wind<\/li>\n
- We’re installing battery storage at a record pace<\/li>\n
- We lead the world in AI<\/li>\n
- We have the strongest military in the world<\/li>\n
- We have an extensive system of global alliances<\/li>\n
- We dominate the final frontier — space<\/li>\n
- We’re more generous than any other country<\/li>\n
- The US rules the world culturally<\/li>\n
- Despite polarization, we’ve become more tolerant and accepting<\/li>\n
- We have robust protections for free speech<\/li>\n
- Our democracy remains rock solid.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Now, the exercise the reader is to count how many of these items are under assault by MAGA, the Trump administration, or both.<\/p>\n
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Another take.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nNY Times, Editorial Board, today<\/strong>: Five Questions That Will Determine America\u2019s Next 50 Years<\/a><\/p>\n
On this Fourth of July, the United States turns 250. A quarter of a millennium is long enough to make a nation feel permanent, as though it had always been here and always will be. But the founders who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence knew that they were making a wager, not a guarantee. They pledged their lives, fortunes and honor precisely because the outcome was in doubt. Two and a half centuries later, the wager is still being placed by every generation that inherits it. That is the truth worth celebrating this summer \u2014 America is still being made.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
…<\/p>\n
Americans can be tempted to treat the country\u2019s founding as either a flawless act of genius or an irredeemable original sin. It was neither. It was a revolutionary moral claim issued by imperfect people who did not fully live up to it. \u201cAll men are created equal\u201d was written by a man who enslaved his fellow human beings; the promise and the betrayal arrived in the same sentence. Yet the promise, once written, could not be undone.<\/p>\n
This foundational promise was followed by three others \u2014 for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The nation\u2019s early fights were mostly over whom would be granted life and liberty. More recent arguments are often over the pursuit of happiness. They turn on the rules of the game: not who is admitted to the common life but what that life owes its members, and what all of us owe the people not yet born. It is the question of whether a free people, through self-government, can build a society in which everyone has a real chance to flourish.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So what are the five questions? Again, I’ll summarize and paraphrase.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Whether self-governing people still share a common reality<\/li>\n
- Whether we can still bear to lose<\/li>\n
- Whether those who work can rise and that their children will rise further<\/li>\n
- Whether the most pluralist nation in history can remain one people<\/li>\n
- Whether we can pass tests that unfold slowly and ask for sacrifice now<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
It has not failed in previous traumas. As in the previous piece, MAGA and Trump are implicated in four of these, in my estimation. On the failing side.<\/p>\n
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I love Connie Willis’ summaries of daily politics, but they are so long each day I don’t often look anymore. But someone on Facebook called this one out, for its optimistic take. Maybe things are changing.<\/p>\n
CW Daily, today<\/strong>: A Happy and Hopeful Fourth of July<\/a><\/p>\n
(Also here<\/a>.) Note that she lives in Greeley, Colorado.<\/p>\n
We went to the Greeley Stampede last night (our local fair and rodeo.) It can be kind of a rough crowd, but this year my husband and I both noticed something different about it\u2013and not just that last year there was lots of MAGA stuff, and this year I saw hardly any red hats or in-your-face T-shirts. What we noticed was people\u2019s attitudes\u2013they were friendly and polite and smiling. Everyone talked to each other\u2013the people at the table where we ate our corn dogs and cherry limeades were all talkative and cheerful, teenagers we were maneuvering around made way for us, and when I told a guy in the line waiting for tickets to get in that I liked his shirt, he gave us two free passes to the fair that he had. Everyone smiled. It was a sea change from last year\u2019s tension and wariness, and it felt like the fever of divisiveness has broken, or at least is breaking.<\/p>\n
A lot of people have been saying they\u2019re despairing this Fourth of July, that they feel more like mourning than celebrating, but I find myself MUCH more hopeful than last year, when Trump and DOGE were running riot, colleges and businesses were caving, and watching 1776 on TV (which we do every Fourth of July, made me sick to my stomach. This year we\u2019re in a much different place. The winds have shifted, and Trump is now struggling on multiple fronts, from his corruption (which was on the front page today) to the war he keeps losing over and over.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
With many many details of current events, and people she loves who helped created America. I’ll resist quoting; it’s the bottom half of the post.<\/p>\n
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A couple more positive notes.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nVox, Bryan Walsh, today<\/strong>: Why Americans are living longer again<\/a>, subtitled “The US death rate just hit a record low, and there\u2019s reason to hope the trend will continue.”<\/p>\n
America is a uniquely sick, unhealthy country \u2014 just ask Americans. We\u2019re addicted to ultraprocessed food<\/a> and succumb to deaths of despair<\/a>. The current US health secretary, who insists we\u2019ve been raising the \u201csickest generation\u201d ever<\/a>, has built an entire political movement<\/a> around the idea that there is something uniquely unwell about America as a country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Resist the negativity bias.<\/p>\n
So it might surprise you to learn that the US actually just set a new record low<\/em> in its death rate, the average American\u2019s odds of dying in a given year. According to provisional data<\/a> released by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) this week, the US registered 689.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 2025. That is the lowest level on record<\/a>. Not the lowest level since the Covid pandemic. The lowest level since the US started keeping organized data more than 125 years ago, and given the obvious public health advances in the 20th century, it is almost certainly America\u2019s lowest death rate through the entire 250 years of its existence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
More data, and graphs, follow.<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/p?<\/p>\nNY Times, Nicholas Kristof, today<\/strong>: What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness<\/a><\/p>\n
\u201cWe actually live the American dream,\u201d Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway who is now the finance minister, told me. \u201cThe American dream, it\u2019s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.\u201d<\/p>\n
Skeptics have argued<\/a> that generous welfare benefits and the resulting high taxes have held back<\/a> the Nordic economies. Perhaps a bit. \u201cFarewell, Nordic model,\u201d The Economist wrote<\/a> in 2006. But Norway is now richer than the United States per capita, and Norwegian workers are more productive than American workers, with higher output per hour. Scandinavians live longer<\/a> than Americans, and people are happier. The five Nordic countries \u2014 Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden \u2014 all rank among the six happiest countries in the world in the World Happiness Report<\/a>, based on Gallup polling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yes, there are many factors involved; Norway is relatively monocultural compared to the US, and so on. But the US never seems interested in learning lessons from other countries.<\/p>\n
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The US is hobbled by forces revealed in these articles.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nThe Atlantic, Jim Rasenberger, today<\/strong>: America\u2019s Most Enduring Belief Is Also One of Its Most Dangerous<\/a>, subtitled “How the simultaneous deaths of two Founding Fathers entrenched the idea that the United States was chosen by God”<\/p>\n
Two hundred years ago<\/span>, on July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other. Today, this is usually recalled, when it\u2019s recalled at all, as trivia. But it was far from trivial when it happened. Americans were stunned that the two men most responsible for the Declaration of Independence\u2014Jefferson its author, Adams its chief advocate\u2014died on the same day, and that this day was the Fourth of July, and that this Fourth of July was the 50th anniversary of the Declaration. \u201cThere is something so strange in it,\u201d Hezekiah Niles of Niles\u2019 Weekly Register<\/i> wrote, \u201cthat we hardly know how to reconcile the fact by the common doctrine of chances.\u201d An eminent mathematician calculated the odds at one in 1.2 billion.<\/p>\n
The events of that day were so extraordinary that many Americans took them as a sign of God\u2019s favor. \u201cA coincidence of circumstances so wonderful,\u201d Secretary of War James Barbour said, \u201cfurnishes a new seal to the hope, that the prosperity of these States is under the special protection of a kind Providence.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Humans are by nature superstitious, and don’t understand odds, or coincidences. They’re always reading in random events great meaning, where none exists.<\/p>\n
This is, I’ve recently realized, an example of the sin of pride<\/strong>. One of the seven deadly sins, yes? It’s pride to think one is special, to think that God made the universe just for you.<\/p>\n
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Trump treats half the American population as enemies.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nNY Times, yesterday<\/strong>: At Mount Rushmore, Trump Veers From Patriotism to \u2018Communism\u2019<\/a>, subtitled “On the eve of July 4, President Trump extolled the nation\u2019s founders while branding his opponents as ‘communists’ in what seemed to be a warm-up for November.”<\/p>\n
Of course, this is childish name-calling. And it’s unbecoming of a president who supposedly leads an entire nation. He is fear-mongering, to the ignorant, xenophobic MAGA base.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nWashington Post, Letters to the Editor, yesterday<\/strong>: Keep church and state separate. Just as the founders wanted.<\/a><\/p>\n
The June 28 news article \u201cTrump\u2019s Religious Liberty Commission aims at church-state separation<\/a>\u201d reported that Ben Carson, vice chair of the president\u2019s Religious Liberty Commission, champions an \u201coriginalist understanding\u201d<\/a> of what the founders thought and what the Constitution says about church-state separation.<\/p>\n
Carson is among those who apparently believe that America was founded as a \u201cChristian nation.\u201d It assuredly was not. In the 1780s, the founders wrote a Constitution that makes no reference to God, Jesus or the Bible. In 1797, the Senate unanimously ratified the Treaty of Tripoli <\/a>\u2014 negotiated by the first president and signed by the second \u2014 which flatly declared that \u201cthe Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.\u201d It is hard to imagine a more dispositive statement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(from Dale Butland of Columbus OH)<\/p>\n
Of course, the religious strive to reinterpret history in their favor.<\/p>\n
What occurred to me today, or perhaps it was something I read that triggered the thought, is that the earliest settlers to North America, and Puritans and the Pilgrims, fled their home country precisely to flee religious persecution. The same kind of persecution MAGA would install in the modern government to oppress non-Christians.<\/p>\n
Again, this is an aspect of human nature that is not easily escaped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the bright side, 25 reasons to be optimistic about the future; 5 questions that will determine America’s next 50 years; Connie Willis relates some potential optimism in the decline of MAGA; Why Americans are living longer; Nicholas Kristof on … Continue reading